Minutes

Greg provided more insight and description to his tacking of the challenge he’s had through wrapping multiple Ajax toolkit libraries in his jMaki project and getting those toolkits through the jMaki files to register themselves and be available to developers through two of Sun’s IDEs.

In general Greg summarized the approach that for every widget.js file (the runtime library loaded) there was also a resources file (as JSON) and a templates file (various formats?). The resources files provided the meta data description of the widget (e.g. its properties and allowed values for those properties, plus additional documentation or pointers to documentation for the widget). The templates files were then instance data for various implementations (e.g. a code snippet for implementing in javascript, another for PHP, another for JSF, etc…) that an IDE could make available for the developer to insert (then change properties or attributes of) at author-time. The process for registering the ajax components with the IDE was by putting the component and description files in a known location to the IDE and starting the IDE. The IDE then scanned for the available files and made them available.

Jon stated that not only looking at toolkits, but also existing IDEs current interfaces for extensions would be valuable. Jon also discussed his thoughts in regards to the approach that XBL has taken towards similar goals and cited many common approaches, but certain ways in which XBL fell short of the needs for ajax toolkit integration into IDEs.

Kevin noted that there had been no contributions to the use cases and requirements pages at the IDE TF wiki and that such contributions were the next step. Further the group agreed after discussion that using our calls to review contributions to the wiki would be better than using the call time to generate and add the uses cases and requirements. Greg, Kevin, Ingo, and Phil committed to making such additions to the wiki pages in time for the next meeting in 2 weeks. Jon stated he’d look into Dreamweaver and GoLive by the next meeting.

Jon also encouraged that looking into the MSFT IDEs’ built-in extension methods would be good as well. However, there was no commitment to do this in time for the next call by any of the attendees.

Next meeting was set for 9:00 am Pacific Time, Thursday the 8th of February.